This article will discuss a potential conflict between the performances indices of the School Report Card and the traditionally strong programs of a school. This will apply to all schools rated and ranked by mandated educational outcomes.

It’s the American Way. Our culture loves to keep score. Scores allow us to point to winners and point at losers. (The prepositions “to” and “at” are significant!) We score sports, movies, cars, pizza and toilet paper. Everything has a score and ranking. Knowing the score allows consumers to make wiser choices, we are told. Scoring also holds athletes, producers, manufacturers, bakers and the paper industry accountable for what they do.

Accountability also is tied to financial efficiency. The more accountably efficient will produce quality indicators a lower cost; the less accountably efficient will produce less quality at a higher cost. All Wisconsin schools now are rated based upon quality indicators of school performance. (The DPI points the public to the School Report Card and then to the DPI’s larger web site where per pupil expenses and school-to-school financials can be found. A future iteration of the School Report Card will include a cost/benefit rating.) Once a score is assigned to a school, the public immediately can identify a school’s success or lack of success by its state assigned number. Winners and Losers. Accountability. However, a love affair with legislated scores may not make for happiness in the home.

My local schools now have numbers that score and rank their performances as effective schools. The scores are: elementary = 79.1, middle school = 73.9; and, high school = 81.8. (http://reportcards.dpi.wi.gov/rc_gibraltar) The scoring key indicates that these are very good, above average scores but not yet the best. As a point of reference, no school has earned a score in the 90s and 100 is hypothetical. Each school meets and exceeds the mandated state standards but there always is room for improvement. But, at what cost will an improved score be achieved?

According to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, “The School Report Card will help parents understand how their child’s school is doing and where it can improve. The new report cards will help all Wisconsin public schools get a better picture of how well they help children learn, advance to the next grade, and graduate ready for college and career. Our goal is to help every student in a Wisconsin school succeed, graduate, and be ready to pursue further education and a career.” (http://reportcards.dpi.wi.gov/files/oea/pdf/parentrptguide.pdf)

Interestingly, the local high school earned “Best High School in America” honors from Newsweek and US News and World Report for each of the past four academic years. Daily attendance, promotion and graduation rates, and technical school and college preparation have been solid, and academic performance on state assessments and ACT have been well above the state average. A good high school performance usually follows good elementary and middle school performances by students during their K-12 enrollment and that is true of our local schools.

So, what is the concern about legislated accountability, especially an accountability that equates success with an indexed score? Our local schools emphasize a “Four A” education for all students. A “Four A” education is a balance of academics, activities, arts and athletics. Besides creating a history of solid academic profiles, our local schools have even stronger traditions in the arts and activities. Each school has full-time music and art teachers. Seven full-time art and music teachers are employed for a K-12 enrollment of 550. All K-12 students have access to the art and music classrooms and the theater. High school students “go to state” every year with One Act theatrical performances. The high school musical has won multiple state awards for student on-stage performances. 80% of the high school students play in the bands or sing in the choirs. Middle and high school students take their forensics skills “to state” every year. Door County (WI) is known nationally for its artists and middle and high school student art work is highly supported by community artists and galleries throughout northern Wisconsin. Students in each school win awards in local, regional and state competitions with their creative writing, especially poetry. Rounding out the final “A”, more than 75% of the middle and high school enrollment is a student-athlete.

This description is not unique to our local schools. It is an accurate description of many small, rural school districts throughout Wisconsin where strong traditions and local support are attached to specific academic, arts, activity or athletic programs. In these small schools the two major complaints about public education do not typically apply. Politicians especially complain that public education does not provide an equal educational opportunity for all students and that school district bureaucracies are stacked too deeply to allow reforms to be enacted. Hence, the wide sweeping reform for accountability through mandates.

So, what should our local schools do? The effective schools research from the University of Michigan shows that with “enough time and resources we can cause all students to succeed with our learning objectives.” However, time and resources, especially time, are finite commodities in rural schools where almost all students are bussed to and from school and bus times can be an hour or more each way. Time is the school day. In order to increase student learning time and teacher time for preparation and instruction of the Common Core Standards, more time will need to be allocated to instruction of the Standards.

Here’s the dilemma. The mandates demand that schools meet increasingly more stringent performance indicators. Meet the mandates or be identified locally and statewide as a non-compliant school. Improvement on the mandated indicators will require a reallocation of resources – time and staff. In the finite world of school resources, reallocating to one area of programs typically results in a loss of resources in another area of programs.

What is the price of keeping score?

School report cards recently were released by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. Each school district and school house in Wisconsin now has an official, annual report card. Data, data everywhere and not a care to be found!

Why?

A quick read of ESEA Information Update Bulletin #02.10 titled Topic: Meeting Report Card Requirements of ESEA published in October 2002 indicates that the DPI is meeting a legislated requirement initiated in 2001 with the No Child Left Behind Act. The initial concepts of the NCLB report card have been edited and refined over the past decade. Spun forward, the purposes of a school report card are to help the school and school district make needed improvements in student academic achievement and behaviors related to academic achievement and to assist parents to make informed decisions regarding the school that is educating their child(ren).

Always insinuated in ESEA mandates is Wisconsin’s loss of federal funds if ALL schools are not compliant with the reporting criteria and accountability measures. The mandates include actions that will be taken against individual school organizations if accountability cannot be met, including the withholding of funds. These funds are an essential part of Wisconsin’s funding formula for public education; without the federal funds, the state cannot meet its commitments to local schools.

What is reported?

The DPI web site for this information is http://reportcards.dpi.wi.gov/

There are four priority areas of accountability. These are:

• Student Achievement in reading and mathematics compared with state and national standards.
• Student Growth in reading and mathematics as measured by annual assessments.
• Closing Gaps in how well specific sub-groups of students are able to meet academic achievement and growth requirements as compared to the aggregated data for all students.
• On-Track to Graduation and Post-Secondary Readiness data that displays how well student groups and students as a whole are progressing as compared to the aggregated data for all students in the school.

There are three indicators of student engagement that also are reported. These are related to DPI statewide goals established by a study of state data over time.

• Test Participation requires a minimum of 95% of students and students by sub-group to participate in required accountability assessments.
• Absenteeism sets the required rate of daily attendance at 84% of the days a student is enrolled in school.
• Drop Out Rates raise flags when more than 6% of the enrollment in the school or in a student cohort drop out of school.

Absent in the new school report card is an essential characteristic that is a consistent heritage in Wisconsin’s schools. The care factor. A local school is the community’s school and the community permeates the school. When a child enrolls in such a community school, a covenant is created between the school and the child’s parents. In a nutshell, this covenant is “We, the school, will assist you, the parents, to educate your child. We, the school, will provide a network of public care for your child, our student.”

Perhaps “care” is assumed in the new design for Wisconsin Accountability. It currently is unstated that school leaders and school staff will take care of their students. If they always have, they always will. If caring for students indeed is an assumption, it may not have to be stated as a measureable school outcome. However, in the political/economics of contemporary public education, what gets measured gets significant organizational attention. Why then should a school’s care factor be ignored?

Should the manner in which a school provides for the health and well-being of a student not matter as much as the child’s ability to read and write? The Child Care Information Center web page is replete with newsletters describing the topics of child “care.” http://165.189.80.100/rll/ccic/mat_newsletters.html and how a school is to implement these topics of care.

There are mandates related to each school’s management of the immunizations of its students. Specific literature has been produced regarding “pandemics.” Schools also are subject to mandates regarding child nutrition, school safety, student welfare, especially related to bullying, and categorical discrimination. Federal and state mandates speak to how schools are to be made safe for and respectful of students. http://sspw.dpi.wi.gov/sspw_safeschool Levels of caring practice often have school personnel teaching and monitoring toileting habits, combing student hair looking for knits and lice, and assuring that a child’s shoe laces are tied.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of the commitment to school-parent covenant regarding child wellness resides in the continuous communication between school and home. As part of their daily routines, teachers call, send texts, and written notes to parents regarding a child’s physical and emotional well-being. Parents call, send texts and written notes about every aspect of their child’s life to the student’s teacher(s). In fact, the reality of ubiquitous communication lives elementary classrooms and elementary school offices where parent communication flows to the school every minute of the day.

Not including the care factor in the new Wisconsin Accountability is tantamount to exhorting all school sports teams to win every athletic contest without a regard for sportsmanship. Opinion pieces in local media constantly rail when an athlete or team violates perceptions of good sportsmanship. Academic accountability without measures of a care for children is just as ignoble.

How interesting it would be to balance the statistically indexed score of school effectiveness that currently dominates the upper left corner of a school report card with an equally visible index of community, student and parent satisfaction with the care that a school provides for its children. Excellent schools are a balance of learned achievement and human care.

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that the thing people forget most often is the thing they are trying to do at the moment. Right now, you either know that this is a true statement because your mind already is thinking of something else or you are waiting a few moments to see if it is true. But you probably do recall a time when you lost track of the exact thing you thought you were doing. This sounds like, “Now, what was I doing?” Nietzsche’s observation is true. In fact, by the time you finish reading this brief piece more than half of your fellow readers will find that their minds have wandered off to something else and whatever Nietzsche wrote will have been forgotten. How apt!

Let’s apply Nietzsche to good teaching. What teachers do every day requires unbelievable episodes of complete concentration. Episodes. Few of us are able to sustain the level of thinking, listening, responding, analysis of ideas, and generation of quality conclusions all of the time. We do not use our mental “A” game every minute of the day; we cannot. However, we are at our “A” game level of focus a great deal of the time and these are the episodes of concentration that count when we are teaching.

Children in the classroom also experience episodic highs and lows of their concentration. A child’s mind wanders just like an adult mind wanders. So, Nietzsche reminds us to focus long enough to complete the episode of teaching we want to achieve – just long enough. Because we know that minds will wander, we need to use our skills to bring the concentration of the children we teach to an attentive focus, conduct the instruction they need to learn, check and reinforce that instruction, and move into practice activities when minds will do what they will do – wander a bit. We also need to back up to provide quality initial instruction for those children whose minds were not with us the first time.

Now, let’s apply this to good learning. We need to engage children and keep them engaged for the time it takes to achieve our learning objective. Probably we should think of child engagement looking like an old-fashioned roller coaster of ups and downs. Consider the amount of mental interactions a child receives in an hour at school. A child has dozens of conversations with classmates. She has in-class instructional activities, hallway conversations, cafeteria talk food servers and table mates, and playground interactions with many more children and other adults. She needs to meet her needs for lunch and nutrition and the need for bathroom breaks. On the upside, a teacher and child are cognitively together and engaged with the teacher’s objective. On the downside, reality touches both a teacher and a child and each must take moments to breath, let their minds expand to the places only their mind will go before the teacher begins to orchestrate the next up cycle.

Nietzsche helps us to understand that believing a child must be “on task” all of the time is not only unlikely but impossible. So, don’t measure “on task” as a time, but consider it as many times.

We know that all people, teachers and children, are vulnerable to wandering thoughts. Knowing that what Nietzsche wrote accurately applies to our abilities to focus and maintain a focus helps us to craft our work and capitalize on episodes when mental attention is riding high. Knowing Nietzsche also helps us to understand and accept those moments when our mind wanders and more importantly to understand that a student’s mind also can and does wander.

“Käymälä.” Say what? “Käymälä.” I don’t know what this word means, and if a person speaking Finnish said it to me with deep anguish, I apologetically would not be able to help her. She might as well have said “sale de bains,” “ badezimmer,” “b no,” “ano,” “ 浴室 便所,”or “ουσ.” It’s all Greek to me. Actually, ουσ is Greek.

Knowing the word for bathroom is often a very important bit of knowledge. Not knowing the word may be even more important given the context. For interest, I have used words that mean bathroom to illustrate the value of a person’s vocabulary.

How many words do you know? 1,000? 10,000? 100,000? You have never counted the words in your vocabulary? Welcome to the hoi polloi (majority of people). Generally, people don’t know how many words they know. We take our knowledge of words for granted. Then, when we encounter a word we don’t know, we usually fake it with a nod or we try to infer the word’s meaning from the rest of the sentence or conversation. In most social conversations, this works. However, what if your knowledge of what a word’s definition would determine the status of your home mortgage, or the success or failure of a business decision, or left a family hungry when all they wanted to know was the location of a nearby grocery. Most often we are not engaged in life or death decisions based upon our words; but we could be in a dire emergency.

Research studies have estimated the number of words a person should know by a given age. This is a sampling of that research.

(Receptive words are words that are commonly used and have a usual and apparent definition. I am hungry. The word hungry would be understood by most listeners. I am famished. The word famished gives more meaning to my hunger; it makes me more than hungry but not yet starved.)

Vocabulary is power. If you have a strong vocabulary with receptive and expressive words, you have the advantage. You understand more of what you read and are told. You can communicate with others in words that you choose to make them know what you want them to know or feel what you want them to feel.

As an educator, the vocabulary of my students directly determined the material I could provide to them to read or hear. Students with large personal vocabularies were days and weeks ahead of classmates. Those with inadequate vocabularies required instruction of needed words before they could understand what they read or heard and then use that information to expand their subject area knowledge. Children with small working vocabularies have significant disadvantages for future academic learning; these children are academically disabled.

Exposure to words is essential. Words that are spoken. Words that are written. Words that are shown in pictures. Children must be exposed to words beginning at a young age and then have an increasing exposure through their school years in order for them to build an adequate vocabulary for academic learning.

Parents – spend time every day talking with your children using appropriate adult language. Keep appropriate adult reading material in places where your children can read it. Pick a word of the week and build word families from that word. Fifty-two word families per year while a child is in school will build 676 word families and that expands into thousands of word!

Robert Marzano and Debra Pickering’s Building Academic Vocabulary develops a solid understanding of the relationship between a child’s developing academic vocabulary and subsequent learning in school. The Oklahoma State Department of Education created a link to their web site based upon this work. The vocabulary lists displayed for each grade K – 8 and specific high school courses of study demonstrate the expanding rigor of school-based vocabulary.

Educators and parents should examine these vocabulary lists and consider the depth of their students’ or child’s academic vocabulary. Students who know these words and terms and have an expressive knowledge of how to use them will be the most competitive in their academic work.

http://ok.gov/sde/building-academic-vocabulary#Vocab

We know that creating a perceived need for action often is needed before an educator or parent can be moved to action. So, here is a way for you to assess your students’ or your child’s or your own vocabulary. How many words do you know? The following web site provides a quiz to approximate the breadth of your vocabulary.

http://dynamo.dictionary.com/

Contemporary federal and state mandates direct local school districts to improve every child’s academic achievement. Vocabulary development and improvement is a good beginning that pays dividends over the years.

Just as in real estate where success is founded on Location! Location! Location, success in school and life can be founded in Vocabulary! Vocabulary! Vocabulary!

I recently read all of the posts on the Harvard Educational Review’s “Voice in Education Blog,” sat for a quiet hour and pondered. What would Curly say about this?

Curly? You remember the Jack Palance character in “City Slickers” who gave his cowboy’s advice to Billy Crystal regarding the secret of life. That was Curly. Billy and his fellow urbanites tried to use a dude ranch experience to “…take the knots out of their ropes.” Alone with Billy on the cattle drive, Curly held up one gloved-finger and said that this one finger is “the secret to life.” Billy, of course, asked what that one finger represented and Curly elucidated, “That’s what you have to figure out and when you do nothing else will…” ever make a difference.

Just in case you have forgotten Curly’s secret of life. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2k1uOqRb0HU

A reference to Curly may cause a professional reader to stop at this point. But that would be a mistake; as much of a mistake as thinking that public education can continue to listen to its many-headed and oppositionally-opinioned commentators and from their well-intended and well-educated words find its educational secrets for a successful future. Or, that public education can find its future without establishing its “secret of life.”

It is not my purpose to propose the text of that secret, though I already know what my one finger represents. It is for states and school districts collectively to do this essential and future-altering work. Until meaning of this “one finger” approach is completed, we will remain not cattle but cats running before the city slickers. For when a local school district’s charge is to implement all of the current federal and state mandates plus all of the legislated statutes that remain “blue” in each state’s department of public education and move this broad implementation to the new fiats of accountability, it is tempting to join Curly on his next cattle drive and hum along to Ghost Riders in the Sky. In the ill-defined work today’s educational leadership, we are as inept and disoriented and ill-equipped for the successful leadership of public education as Billy Crystal was to become a cowboy.

If you have done the Curly work and know the secret to your educational work and leadership, hold up your finger when you read the next blog and attend your next workshop or listen to the next exhorting politician cum educational critic or taxpayer group wanting more for less. If their words do not comport with your #1, ride on and leave those words where they belong in the dust behind you as you carry on in the direction of your pointed finger.